We should have the same desire expressed by Sir John A MacDonald to Queen
Victoria, the Mother of Confederation, "to live under the sovereignty
of Your Majesty and your family for ever."
A Christian Monarchist Canadian Tory Blog

Monday, October 08, 2012

I find embryonic stem cell research very troubling, so I am glad we are discovering adult cels can be turned into pluripotenial cells. Congratulations to John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka!!!
STOCKHOLM, Sweden -- British researcher John Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka of Japan won this year's Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine on Monday for discovering that mature, specialized cells of the body can be reprogrammed into stem cells -- a discovery that scientists hope to turn into new treatments.
Scientists want to harness that reprogramming to create replacement tissues for treating diseases like Parkinson's, diabetes and for studying the roots of diseases in the laboratory.
The prize committee at Stockholm's Karolinska Institute said the discovery has "revolutionized our understanding of how cells and organisms develop."
Gurdon showed in 1962 -- the year Yamanaka was born -- that the DNA from specialized cells of frogs, like skin or intestinal cells, could be used to generate new tadpoles. That showed the DNA still had its ability to drive the formation of all cells of the body.
In 1997, the cloning of Dolly the sheep by other scientists showed that the same process Gurdon discovered in frogs would work in mammals.
More than 40 years after Gurdon's discovery, in 2006, Yamanaka showed that a surprisingly simple recipe could turn mature cells back into primitive cells, which in turn could be prodded into different kinds of mature cells.
Basically, the primitive cells were the equivalent of embryonic stem cells, which had been embroiled in controversy because to get human embryonic cells, human embryos had to be destroyed. Yamanaka's method provided a way to get such primitive cells without destroying embryos.